Joyce Copra has done several projects based on Joyce Carol Oates’ stories or books, including a version of Blonde that was not very good. This was another film with its roots in an works of Oates . Connie (Laura Dern), a teenage girl in her sophomore year, is starting to grow up. While she is hanging out during a boring summer with not much to do, she starts being stalked by the Charlie Starkweather-esque Arnold (Treat Williams).
The plot isn’t that far off from Blue Velvet—it’s a suburban town with a dark underbelly . The last third of the movie is a cat and mouse game between Connie and Arnold, where he manages to get her into his car and then alternately flatters and abuses her. Oates’s story was inspired by the actions of a real serial killer, Charles Schmid, who stalked and killed teenage girls in Tucson.
Dern is perfectly fine, and Williams is fairly menacing. Arnold affects a James Dean style, although it’s set in the 1980s, and he’s clearly in his 30s. The viewer knows he’s a creep from the get-go, but he manages to charm Dern, whose character isn’t old enough to easily spot the signals when this much older guy comes around. Mary Kay Place plays Dern’s mother, and the conflict between those two characters is probably the most believable part of the film.
The story probably worked better on the page than in the film, as the story is a lot more ambiguous (which would have helped, actually). Unfortunately, Chopra is a poor director—there’s a reason why she’s mostly worked in TV. It feels really televisual, and given her future work, that makes sense. In fact, it was an American Playhouse production released as a feature film.
Smooth Talk is probably a little overrated and didn’t really deserve this Criterion Collection edition. The extras include a conversation between Dern, Chopra and Oates from the 2020 New York Film Festival, which coincided with the film being restored; a new interview with William, Place and Chopra; an archival interview with Chopra; an interview with production designer David Wasco; a bunch of Chopra’s short films; and an audio reading of the Life magazine article that inspired the short story; the original trailer and a trailer from the 2020 reissue. The accompanying booklet includes a new essay on the film, Oates’ original short story, and a 1986 piece from Joyce Carol Oates that came out around the time the film was released.
★★
Ian Schultz
psychotroniccinema.com 